When Anime Abstraction Becomes Art: Satoshi Kon's PARANOIA AGENT (2004, Japan)

Last week, we finally got to screen Japanese Anime Master Satoshi Kon’s 2004 13 episode television marvel Paranoia Agent. For all its messiness and occasional sense of slapdashness, this 5 1/2 hour meditation on self-delusion in the guise of a kaleidoscopic police procedural mystery is a revelation of what an artist can do when they’re really plugged into the possibilities of their medium. Much in the same way David Lynch’s Twin Peaks had done before, Paranoia Agent really develops its story around a theme that only becomes apparent as the show goes on. Slowly with each episode, we realize the series is about how people delude themselves as a self-defense mechanism. But it also becomes about how such self-delusion, while sometimes necessary for self preservation, must also ultimately be transcended. In the end, Paranoia Agent becomes about how difficult it is to be honest with oneself about one’s actions. But how such honesty may be the narrow bridge to grace.

Paranoia Agent’s story, such as it is, focuses on a shadowy teenage criminal nicknamed “L’il Slugger” or “Shonen Bat” who attacks people who all live near each other. He appears to them on golden skates with a bent baseball bat and proceeds to beat them before disappearing again into the night. The attacks almost spread like a contagion. First an overworked product designer is attacked in a parking lot. Then the Tabloid Journalist looking to scoop her story gets attacked. Then a local cocky schoolboy gets attacked then his seemingly demure Tutor who actually moonlights at night as a call girl/escort in high demand. . .

Each episode takes on a new main character or group of main characters involved in the attacks or investigation of the attacks. And as we head into the backend of the thirteen episodes, the episodes get stranger, more tangential, more “meta”, until L’il Slugger appears to be inciting a kind of apocalypse of self-denial and mass delusion.

In 2004, Kon was coming off a trifecta of mind-blowing anime features-Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers-and had many residual ideas he hadn’t been able to use. So he came up with the Paranoia Agent idea as a way of getting all those ideas out before they got lost to moving on. So in an interesting way, the form and desire to experiment with residual gags, bits, fragments of narratives preceded the content.

Sometimes experimentation itself is the most exciting and inspiring thing. And that is often the case here in Paranoia Agent. The metaphor of self-delusion is beautifully and unsettlingly addressed in a very satisfying way. But one of the greatest joys of the series is experiencing each new episode with its new main character(s), its new structural form, its new unique twist on storytelling. Each episode is completely different from the one before and after it.

One episode is entirely structured around four women gossiping outside an apartment complex-their tales of L’il Slugger reflect their characters more than any objective truth. Another episode breaks down how animated series get made (!!) including explaining job positions while at the same time showing how an employee who refuses to take responsibility for mistakes can jeopardize everyone’s work.

Late in the series one of the most grounded characters, a disgraced Police Detective, succumbs to hiding in a kind of one dimensional fantasy world rather than deal with his ailing wife, even though he’s preached being realistic the entire series. Another episode is structured around a long thread DM chat, etc.

My favorite personal episode was Episode #3 which deals with the double life of Harumi Chono, the university student/tutor who moonlights as a call girl/escort. Her night self taunts her day self to the point where we realize Harumi clearly has paranoid schizophrenia. The episode feels like some of the residual ideas Kon may have had from his psychological thriller Perfect Blue but also as a rough draft for what he would do with this concept in Paprika.

There are so many wonderful stylistic grace notes throughout the series. The opening credits play against a rhapsodic pop song while we see our main characters seemingly laughing at impending Armageddon. The end credits show all our main characters sleeping peacefully in a grassy meadow. Their tranquil smiles belie the raging conflict we know as their reality in waking life. And each episode ends with a cryptic “Prophecy” from an Old Man on the Moon about the contents of the next episode. It’s fascinating to see how Lynch’s Twin Peaks inspired at least two other brilliant television projects: Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom Part I, II, (and now III coming later this year!) and Kon’s Paranoia Agent.

Satoshi Kon who died tragically young from cancer in 2010 would go from Paranoia Agent to make his most surreal and wildest film Paprika. One senses Paranoia Agent gave him the confidence to make a feature that almost completely exists on dream logic and in the dream world.

But watching and experiencing Paranoia Agent, I was reminded how important the sheer excitement to express an idea or gag or character or narrative structure is to audience enjoyment. David Lynch once famously counseled a too serious Nicholas Cage on Wild At Heart that the artist must have some kind of fun if the audience is going to have fun. And while truly great work usually does include a large amount of suffering and trial and error, it also often expresses the exhilaration of the artist who’s got hold of a juicy premise or an exciting idea or take and wants to explore and wring it out for everything it’s worth.

What’s most fascinating and instructive is that often exploring these formal ideas does lead to a surprising thematic strength and unity. Polish filmmaker Krystof Kieslowski’s TV series The Dekalog explicitly becomes about the complexity of trying to live by a moral code in an existence where no one dogmatic approach works. Twin Peaks ultimately feels about trauma. The Kingdom ultimately about belief and non-belief in the spiritual world. Paranoia Agent about self-delusion.

These ideas are often hard to come by. But when they do, as they did for Kon in Paranoia Agent, they are as fun to experience as an audience members the artist appears to have experienced in their creation. As Akira Kurosawa often said in interviews making movies is hard work but it’s also a joy to create.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.